Senior Backend Python Engineer

3MD Inc. • Redmond, WA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

A Senior Backend Python Engineer with strong systems thinking and API integration experience is sought to design, build, and scale an AI-driven network operations platform. The role focuses on backend services, data pipelines, and integrations with upstream tools, ensuring reliability, performance, and correctness in a production environment.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science AI, Data Engineering, or related field
• 5+ years of experience as a DevOps, Data Engineering, or AI infrastructure
• Strong Python expertise
• 5+ years professional software engineering experience (or equivalent)
• Demonstrated “extreme competency” in Python: data structures, async patterns, error handling, testing, packaging, etc.
• Experience building backend APIs and services (FastAPI, Flask, Django REST, or similar).
• Experience with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) and designing schemas for operational systems.
• Solid understanding of I/O performance, concurrency, and reliability in distributed systems.
• Proven experience integrating with third-party and internal APIs.
• Comfortable working with REST/JSON, authentication schemes, and potentially HTML scraping or direct DB connectivity when APIs aren’t available.
• Strong grasp of object-oriented programming, software design principles, and maintainable architecture.
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices, logging, monitoring, and production support.
• Ability to work independently in a small, high-trust team, owning features end-to-end.
• Strong communication skills to work directly with product and operational stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Understanding of basic networking concepts (routes, subnets/CIDR, DNS, IPAM, firewalls, routers, alarms).
• Experience with NOC environments, monitoring, alarming, maintenance windows, and change management.
• Experience working alongside LLM-based systems (e.g., ChatGPT) for coding, code review, or operations.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Exposure to agentic coding patterns (AI factories, tool orchestration) is a plus but not a requirement.
• Experience with Prefect or similar workflow orchestrators (Airflow, Dagster, etc.).
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized deployments.
• Prior work integrating with observability/monitoring stacks (e.g., Splunk).

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain Python-based backend services and APIs (e.g., FastAPI or similar).
• Build robust integrations with systems such as ServiceNow, Splunk, IPAM, DNS, routing/device lookup tools, and other internal platforms.
• Ensure services are built with high reliability, concurrency, and performance in mind.
• Develop and maintain workflows using Prefect (or similar orchestration tools) for document ingestion and preprocessing (e.g., manuals, internal docs).
• Develop and maintain workflows using Prefect (or similar orchestration tools) for vectorization pipelines and blob storage management for retrieval.
• Develop and maintain workflows using Prefect (or similar orchestration tools) for scheduled and event-driven workflows for ticket summarization, alarm correlation, compliance workflows, etc.
• Implement automatic retries, logging, and observability for all workflows.
• Integrate with a wide range of operational tools (e.g., device lookup, route lookup, trace route, change record lookup).
• Help transition existing “agentic tools” and internal scripts into MCP-based tools and standardized interfaces over time.
• Work with internal tool owners (e.g., networking automation platforms) using APIs, HTML scraping, or direct DB access where needed.
• Write clean, well-structured, testable Python code.
• Optimize for I/O, disk operations, and concurrency in a high-volume production environment.
• Contribute to system design for redundancy, fault tolerance, and scalability.
• Work within 2-week sprints, owning tickets from design to deployment and validation with customer teams.
• Collaborate closely with Product Owners/Managers on requirements and scope.
• Collaborate closely with AI Specialists on model usage, prompting, and agentic coding patterns.
• Collaborate closely with NOC and network engineers to deeply understand domain workflows (e.g., shift handover, maintenance windows, alarm correlation).
• Participate in code reviews and knowledge sharing across lanes.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) plan and company contribution
• Short-term disability coverage
• Long-term disability coverage
• Basic life insurance
• Wellbeing benefits
• Up to 6 scheduled paid holidays per calendar year
• Up to 112 hours of PTO based on years of service (for eligible hourly/non-exempt and exempt employees)
• Up to 8 hours of paid volunteer time annually
• Additional paid sick leave (if required by state or local law)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees